Mourning for Children in India
A film for Compassion International

The problem

After 48 years in India, Compassion International was forced to shut down its entire operation there. A change in the country's foreign-funding law cut off the flow of support to 589 centers and roughly 145,000 children, along with the staff, churches, and sponsors tied to them. Compassion had been the single largest foreign donor to the country. Its closure was the biggest loss in the organization's history, and it became a national story.

For the sponsors, this wasn't news. It was a loss. Many had supported the same child for years, written letters back and forth, watched them grow up from across the world. Now that relationship was ending, not by anyone's choice, and there was nothing they could do about it. As part of the shutdown, sponsors were given the chance to write one final letter to their child, with no guarantee it would ever arrive. That was the weight Compassion needed to help hundreds of thousands of people carry. Not to spin it, not to soften it. To honor it.

What we did

I created one of three films made to help sponsors through that grief. The three were built to work together, walking supporters through the loss with honesty rather than trying to talk them out of it.

This is a different kind of filmmaking than selling or celebrating. The job wasn't to hand anyone a tidy ending, because there wasn't one. It was to sit in the grief with people and give it somewhere to go. To let sponsors mourn the children and the years of work well, and to hold the truth of what was being lost without flinching from it. Getting that tone right, grief carried with care instead of melodrama, was the whole task, and it's the hardest thing to do well.

The result

The three films were shown across Compassion's staff and supporters. Mine traveled further than I ever expected. I was in a meeting when the CEO walked in, just back from Washington, where the organization was making an eleventh-hour push to save its work in India. He told me they'd shown my film to the White House Cabinet, and that there wasn't a dry eye in the room. The Cabinet's response was that they wanted to show it to the President the next day.

The closure drew national attention and was covered by the New York Times, and the fate of the 145,000 children was serious enough to prompt a congressional hearing in Washington.

But the honest measure of a piece like this isn't reach, or where it ended up. It's whether it helped people carry something almost too heavy to carry. That's what it was for.

"I interviewed and hired Mark at Compassion. He was trusted with increasingly complex, high-profile work, and consistently exceeded expectations. His creative eye and depth of talent are only matched by his immense heart."
— Matt Monberg, Director of Supporter Experience, Compassion International

"Mark grasps concepts quickly, instinctively, and delivers work others take years to master. He's truly one of the best."
— Casey Scofield, Global Creative Director, Naked Wines